Ryan M from the John Edwards campaign claims that the campaign is listening to the blogosphere / social media. Sorry Ryan, but the facts speak otherwise. On January 6th, 2007, I posted “How to Forge a New American Mandate Via Social Media Political Revolution”. There was a listing of the major candidates in one section of the post “Scoble’s posts made me think how can we truly integrate social media into campaigns(and after the election). John Edwards said in his interview with Scoble that we need “a bottom up democracy.” It’s an amazing challenge requiring change in our government not seen in over a generation. The campaigns for President of John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Vilsack, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Newt Gingrinch, Frank Keating, Chuck Hagel, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Mitt Romney and Tommy Thompson would be wise not to adopt this as a tactic but as a way to redesign government’s interaction with our citizens. Democrat or Republican is not the issue here.”
The post also stated the following “This is a post on how to use social media to improve accountability in political campaign. As such I’d like to learn which Presidential campaigns are actively monitoring the blogosphere. Please leave a comment if you have an official association with one of these candidates and feel free to discuss this post in your own communities.”
Not only did John Edwards campaign not leave a response, sadly no campaign checked in. A simple RSS alert on the candidates name would have caught this post, yet no campaign did. I was simply looking for affirmation that campaigns were truly listening to the blogosphere / social media consistently. Unfortunately, the campaigns aren’t monitoring the whole blogosphere on a consistent basis yet.
It seems like there is a difference between monitoring the blogosphere and engaging every blogger on their blogs.
It looks like Edwards is being mentioned on blogs around once every 10 minutes today.
http://technorati.com/search/%22john+edwards%22
I imagine monitoring is use to find themes that people are latching onto and to look for feedback on speeches as he tours the country more than direct engagement.
Ed,
I posted this in the slow period after the trip for just this reason. My post also pointed to some concepts regarding the changes necessary to incorporate blogosphere and social media both into campaigns and after the election.
We might not comment on every post, but that does not mean we aren’t listening (or printing).
Ryan,
While that might be fine in most cases, it’s pretty lame here. The post specifially asked for a specific action to measure blogosphere / social media listening, had you actually read it, you would’ve left a short “hello, we’re here message.”
So far all I see is a campaign tactic, not actual listening.
Hi, I help run the JRE 08 blog. Just want to assure you that we are here and we are listening.
Thanks for your interest in the senator’s campaign.
Wait… they print stuff from the blogosphere? Isn’t John Edwards supposed to be a little greener than most? Why can’t they just save links, like the rest of the world?